Developers Complete First Phase of Construction at Brooklyn’s Navy Green

City officials and developers gathered last week at the former site of the “Brig”, a former naval prison in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, to celebrate the completion of the first phase of an $18 million project designed to reconvert the site into affordable housing.

City officials and developers gathered last week at the former site of the “Brig,” a naval prison in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, to celebrate the completion of the first phase of an $18 million project designed to reconvert the site into affordable housing.

Navy Green Brooklyn NYC

Navy Green, as the master plan was named, is the result of a three-day International Design Workshop that was held in December 2003 by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) in its efforts to create a conceptual redevelopment plan of the vacant 103,000-square-foot property. HPD tapped a development team including L + M Development Partners, Dunn Development Corp. and Pratt Area Community Council (PACC) along with master planner and architect FX Fowle Architects, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects LLP as architect, Architecture in Formation as design architect and Brooklyn-based Todd Rader and Amy Crews Landscape Architecture LLC as the landscape architect.

According to a statement for the press, Navy Green is being developed under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, a multi-billion dollar initiative that aims to finance and create 165,000 affordable housing units for half a million New Yorkers by the close of the 2014 fiscal year.

Construction at the site started in September 2010. Now, three years after groundbreaking, the Navy Green project counts two mixed-use buildings and one supportive housing facility which, combined, have around 300 apartments ranging from studios to three-bedroom units.

At 110,640 square feet and a $36.3 million investment, the 12-story mixed-use building at 7 Clermont Avenue is the largest and most expensive of the three. It has 112 units—22 studios, 32 one-bedrooms, 47 two-bedrooms and 11 three-bedrooms—as well as almost 6,000 square feet of ground floor retail space.

The second building, which is located at 45 Clermont Avenue, cost $27 million to construct. It is an eight-story low-income rental building with 33 studios, 36 one-bedrooms, and 32 two-bedrooms.

The $21.9 million supportive housing building was developed with support of the Pratt Area Community Council (PACC) and is located at 40 Vanderbilt Avenue. It includes 98 units that will be occupied by formerly homeless single adults and low-income single adults; all of its residents will have access to onsite services such as medical care, recreation and vocational training through a partnership with Brooklyn Community Housing and Services, Inc.

According to official information, the next phase of the Navy Green project calls for more mixed-income housing and is set to begin next month.

“We’re excited to have converted this property from an obsolete use into a vibrant new community using the best practices of sustainable design and green construction. By combining supportive housing and affordable rental and homeownership units with market rate condos and townhouses, all sharing a common green, Navy Green is a model for mixed-income urban community development,” said Martin Dunn, president of Dunn Development Corp.